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You mean like this (done in Designer without any need for a script)? Screen Recording 2023-06-05 at 09.03.29.mov

Short version: when it is supported by the underlying libraw engine (see https://www.libraw.org/node/2753), or if you or on a Mac, then alternatively Apple's RAW engine (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213267), as both engines are supported by the Affinity products on the Mac.

He is asking for a native ARM64 (technically aarch64) build of the Affinity apps to run on his 64-bit ARM Windows system. This would need to be built by Serif, so why would that be directed to Microsoft? The "official" response from Serif has generally been: However, this is no longer quite exactly true. WPF is available for aarch64 (ARM64) at this point, but only supported for newer versions of Windows than the minimum versions that Serif is supporting. They should be able to build a native aarch64 version now that would run on Windows 11, but not on Windows 10.

In the meantime you might try searching for it in Google and adding site:forum.affinity.serif.com to the search terms.

It won't bring me back. Adobe lost me 100% as a customer when they went subscription-only. Other companies have since suffered the same fate. For me this is a matter of principle and I won't compromise it. "Native" productivity software (anything which does not run "in the cloud" where the company has a *legitimate* ongoing need to pay for bandwidth, servers, etc. to permit usage of the software) equates to no subscriptions allowed. Period. For some users and use cases. Some of us would have zero benefit from this. I might have *rare* benefit from generative AI, certainly not enough of a benefit frequently enough to jump to a higher-priced application unless it has other things to offer as well. Definitely not enough that I would ever consider a subscription over it. I do recognize that it will make a bigger difference for other users. Selection assistance AI, I would probably make much more use of, but not at the cost of a subscription.

It's a tool, like any other. Use it or don't as appropriate for the work at hand. I think the biggest "bang for the buck" when it comes to current AI tech is going to be in selections rather than in generation of content - using AI techniques to identify things in the picture in order to more quickly zero in on what should be selected to help the user target things they want to manipulate.

Not quite. Photo has more than just the Photo persona: it also has tone mapping, RAW developing, the export persona, the liquify persona, none of which are available via StudioLink in Publisher. Even in the Photo persona, the actual Photo application supports the various stack/merge features and the batch processing feature, all of which are missing from Publisher. Designer also has the export persona and the pixel persona. The pixel persona is kind of pointless in Publisher if you also have Photo, but if you do not have Photo, then it would still add something of value. Publisher does not have anything like the export persona at this time. There have been several requests to unite these into one application with ALL of the features in one place, but these have consistently been shot down by Serif.

They do, but you need to remember that in the Affinity products you have both a vector selection (layers) and a raster selection (the "marching ants"); if you just use a bare Copy command it usually gives preference to the vector selection over the raster one (though there are some exceptions) so it will copy the selected layer rather than the selected raster area, and if no layer is selected, it has nothing to copy. Try Copy Merged instead for a more consistent behavior of copying the raster selection area across all visible layers. On the Mac this is command+shift+C. This is most likely a Windows limitation due to having only three modifier keys available, as the selection tools generally use all four on the Mac, and something had to be left out. When using the marquee tools on the Mac: Drag: create/move Shift+Drag: constrain aspect ratio Control+Drag: add to selection Option+Drag: subtract from selection Command+Drag: move layer with selection Check the hints on the status bar across the bottom of the Affinity Photo window to find equivalents if you are on a modifier-key-deficient platform. Image layers are not "non-standard" and are likely to be more common than pixel layers when working with Designer and (particularly) with Publisher. The Layers panel is a common interface component among the apps so giving special treatment to the pixel layer in terms of its appearance within the Layers panel doesn't really make much sense from the perspective of the suite as a whole. The layer types are instead distinguished using icons on the left side of the Layers panel. Also, I believe an embedded document layer is considered to be more like a smart object, rather than an image layer. Not quite the same thing. Agreed that it does not have a "+", which would make its function FAR more obvious, but its contrast looks about the same to me as the other icons surrounding it? In Preferences/Settings -> Tools, try turning on "Use shift modifier to cycle tools" (or whatever the Windows equivalent of that is).

Extrusion in this context is a fairly well-understood function. The application makes a duplicate of the object and connects the duplicate to the original at each node around its edges, forming shapes between those connected nodes which are then filled with an indicated color, pattern, gradient, etc. Not to be confused with the extruders which are components of 3D printers.

More directly: https://www.libraw.org/node/2710

This has come up before several times, and Serif has consistently indicated they have no intention of merging the apps.

The only way you could do that would be to add a new pixel layer to contain the results of the inpainting process. This would complicate the tool since you would need to have both the source image layer and the destination pixel layer identified to it; if multiple layers may be selected, how does the tool know if it is to react independently on both of them, or split their purpose in this way? If the tool just creates the output layer when the selected source layer is an image layer, would it create new ones for every stroke?

It adds clutter, provides no new functionality, and exchanges one potential cause of newbie confusion for another: specifically, why we have two icons that open the same panel when all of the other panels only have one. I am not convinced this "issue" you keep referring to exists, but would it not be a better solution to simply show both colors in one icon, making it look more like the color indicator from the toolbar on the desktop version? Or perhaps more like this? I can scroll if needed, and I already do need to scroll the tools on the left. There is simply no need to clutter the list with a duplicate icon that has nothing new to offer. The undo and redo buttons can be turned off in preferences (as they are on mine). You can get the same undo functionality by tapping with two fingers, and you can also access both features more directly simply by tapping on entries in the History panel. The help button (in my opinion) is OK where it is, but it could easily be moved to the hamburger menu as well.

On my iPad there is not enough room in the bar along the right to add that additional indicator without forcing the set of icons to be scrolled. We already have users complaining that having icons that far down along the sides is disrupting their workflows because they don't have room to rest their hands without activating features from those icons in the corners, and while I consider that a user adaptation concern and don't necessarily agree with removing the icons there, I don't think adding another one simply to avoid confusion by users who will learn the current system in time is going to be a popular recommendation among those with smaller or more normal sized iPad displays.

For whatever it might be worth, I was looking at the idea of combining those two panels. I do not agree at a conceptual level that those panels somehow "belong" together, but there are some practical limitations of the way that the UI has been set up on the iPad that makes me inclined to agree with the overall notion of merging those panels on the iPad version - not on the desktop version - of the software, unless more meaningful changes to the UI render that unnecessary. The problem becomes that unless you have the larger iPad Pro displays (not all of us do) you will wind up scrolling to access most of the panels after they are merged. Your design omits a few critical components of the panels to give the illusion that they will somehow fit together onto one display, but that is not quite the case. I do think it could be done in a reasonable way, but additional controls would need to be represented somehow, probably by adding tabs or popups in various places. That would unfortunately mean extra taps/"clicks" to access those features, potentially negating the benefit of merging the panels, depending on the use cases of individual users. There may be a happy medium here somewhere, but this would require a bit more careful planning to work it out.

note that as an alternative you can use the [ and ] keys on the keyboard depending on the tool you have selected (and those keys can be customized if needed)

Strange or not, I rather like some of the things I can accomplish with it, so I'm against any proposal that removes that ability.

Noise is treated as a property of color in the Affinity products because it is set individually for each stop of a gradient, allowing the noise to be graduated between the stops. That would not be possible if it were moved to the FX panel which does not tie its properties to gradient stops.

There was a time when displaying a splash screen was actually a violation of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for the Mac. They seem to have relaxed this in more recent versions, but point being, their presence is not favored in modern application design. The Affinity apps load fast enough that the splash screen could easily be (and therefore should be) eliminated completely.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to create sections for things at that level, and those can have names.

This is already being developed, as per the pinned thread on "Scripting". In the meantime many types of barcodes can be done using special barcode fonts and there are 3rd-party tools that can be used for QR codes and the like.

I save even more space than that. Once of the first things I do after setting up Photo on a new computer or user account is to close that panel since I never use it. If you do find it useful for some reason, then I can see how that could save a bit of time on scrolling, but at the expense of time spent either memorizing the icons or waiting for tooltips to pop up telling you what each one is.